I am not sure this image counts as gaudy – brash perhaps.  I was uncertain so I looked up the synonyms and some of these seem to fit:

flamboyant, flaring, flashy, garish, glitzy, loud, noisy, ostentatious, razzle-dazzle, splashy, swank (or swanky)

The piece in this image is by Victor & Rolf and takes as its starting point the Dutch tradition of dipping a child’s shoe in silver in order to preserve a memory.  To treasure the past.  To freeze time.

It is one of a series of exhibits from the Picture House art and design project presented by English Heritage at Belsay Hall in 2007.  The Hall and Gardens are approximately twenty miles northwest of where we live so at least there was travel involved.

It is probably self-evident that I have been fiddling about with this image but that is part of the fun of digging around in the archives. This time I was using the freeware version of onOne Picture Effects 4; there is a hint of an HDR filter applied and quite a lot of graduated blue.